Will The Real God Please Stand Up

The reaction to my recent post The Gods That Never Were was not exactly what I might have expected, especially the part about Cain. So here’s a slightly different rendition which is based solely on the Bible:

 “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26) Note: God didn’t say that he was going to make man in his image, but rather in “our” image. So, who else was there (in the beginning) that had a key part in Creation? Keep in mind that it had to be someone with the same image and likeness as God. In addition, whoever it was also had to look like man since man was supposedly made in the image and likeness of the creator god.

“Then God said, ‘I give you… every tree that has fruit and seed in it.  They will be yours for food.’” (Genesis 1:29) and “And the Lord God commanded the man…’you must not eat from the Tree of Knowledge…for when you eat from it you will surely die.’” (Genesis 2:16-17). Note: So God gave man the Tree of Knowledge and then took it back. What was he afraid of?

“And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us.” (Genesis 3:22). Note: So man was somehow elevated to the level of a god (which is confirmed in Genesis 3:5). Now we know what he was afraid of.

“…and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord. (Genesis 4:1) and “This is the written account of Adam’s family line…When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters.” (Genesis 5:1-5). Note: The Bible never says that Cain and Abel were the children of Adam. However, it does say that they were children of Eve and it also says that Eve had “gotten” Cain from God (the Lord).

“ Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother.” (John 3:12) and “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.” (John 8:44) Note: The Bible thus confirms that Adam was not the father of Cain as the father of Cain was a murderer and was referred to as “that wicked one”.

To recap, two or more entities who had the same image and likeness of man created mankind. There apparently wasn’t much of a difference between these creators and mankind since the creators acknowledged that man could (and did) attain the same level of godhood as them. Cain and Abel were not fathered by Adam but were the direct result of the actions of one of the creator gods. In the case of Cain, that creator god was not considered to be a very nice person, to say the least. In any event, he certainly could not have been Adam, or even God for that matter.

However, they certainly could have been the fathers of the sons of God, as it was described in the Bible. The sons of God (bene ha’elohim) made their first appearance in the Bible as follows: “The sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves… when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them….”(Genesis 6: 2-4). The elohim (a plural term) were the gods of the Genesis creation story and the Hebrew word elohim was generally translated as the Lord (a singular term) in Genesis 2. So what we have is the gods of Genesis 2 who spawned the sons of the gods of Genesis 6.  As it says in Psalm 82:6, “I (Jehovah) have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the Most High”.

So where does that leave us? Well, the Bible says that, “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance…For the Lord’s portion is his people; Jacob (Israel) is the lot of his inheritance.” (Deuteronomy 32:8-9) Well, the Bible is clearly saying that the god of the Bible is not God, the Prime Creator (the Most High). So maybe there’s some truth to the Gospel of Judas, the spot where Jesus tells the disciples that they were praying to a creator god, but not to God, the Prime Creator.  Perhaps, that’s why his true teachings were ultimately suppressed.

 

Epilogue

Some scientists actually agree with the Bible on parts of this issue. For example, Francis Crick, a world-famous biologist who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the molecular structure of DNA, said that life on Earth was intentionally seeded by an extraterrestrial race (read: the elohim). Then there’s a recent DNA study from the Harvard Medical School, in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, which found that ancient man had sex with a still unknown species. This species was, in fact, the bene ha’elohim. They walked like men and talked like men, just like their fathers, the elohim, did in the Garden of Eden; and like their fathers they also mated with human females.

All of which confirms that man really was created in the image of the gods, and descended from them as well. It’s just that none of these creator gods were actually G-d. The next question, of course, is just who created them? Will the real God please stand up.

 

 

“For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many).”

 – 1 Corinthians 8:5

 

Ten Things I Know About God

The Pascal Wager states that, “If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible.” However, I think that it is possible to deduce some things about God through the use of logic and negative inference. So with apologies to deists everywhere, here are ten things that I know about God:

10. God is not a man. After all, men wrote the Bible and so, of course, God is always described as Him.  One does have to wonder, though, where the first X and Y chromosomes came from.

9. God doesn’t get migraines or have a bad-hair day. However, God might be bi-polar since he did destroy his own creation.

8. God is not omniscient. God didn’t know that his own “perfect” creation would turn out to be imperfect and have to be destroyed. It actually sounds more like an experiment gone terribly awry. In hindsight, though, we should have guessed as much since after creating man, God saw that “it was good”. Really, don’t you think that he should have known that his creation would have been good in advance (before he created it)? Even then, he was wrong about it being good, wasn’t he?

7. God isn’t a very good parent. In the Genesis story, God told his children not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. When they did, he punished them severely (life in prison, so to speak). Of course, since God didn’t teach them right from wrong, there was no way for them to comprehend the concepts of good and evil; in short, they didn’t understand that disobedience was bad. If something similar would have happened today, the parent would certainly have been charged with child abuse, wouldn’t they? In any event, I think that God qualifies as an absentee parent since he hasn’t visited his children in 3,000 years, give or take.

6. God was an “Indian giver.”  First, God gave man the Tree of Knowledge (i.e. Genesis 1:29  says, “Then God said, ‘I give you… every tree that has fruit and seed in it.  They will be yours for food.’”). Then later, God took the gift back (i.e. Genesis 2:16,17 says, “And the Lord God commanded the man…’you must not eat from the Tree of Knowledge…for when you eat from it you will surely die.’” ). Of course, God lied about the dying part, now didn’t he?

          5. See the end of #6.

4. God is the source of evil. For this one a little background is required. That is, in the beginning all there was was God. Nothing else; God and only God. By definition, then, evil could have only come from God, notwithstanding the church’s absurd dogma of “creation out of nothing.” Creation out of nothing was the church’s rationalization as to how something that is evil (man) could have come from something that is perfect (God). However, as Roman philosopher Lucretius said, “Nothing comes from nothing.”

Regardless of whether or not God created man out of nothing, he certainly intended to   create evil, as he is presumably all-powerful and all-knowing. The Bible actually confirms this (e.g.“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.” – Isaiah 45:7).

3. The god of the Bible has a split personality. The god of the Old Testament acts totally different from the god of the New Testament. Further, the god of the Old Testament walked and talked with Adam and Eve, Abraham and Moses. He even wrestled with Jacob. To prove his godhood, he would kill innocent men, women and children. People feared him, obviously for good reason. As opposed to that, the god of the New Testament was considered to be spirit only, according to Paul and the Book of John. It is not surprising, then, that John said that no man had ever seen God. I guess one can infer from what he said that the Old Testament stories were not true and, therefore, not the Word of God.

 … or could it just simply be that the god of the Old Testament and the god of the New Testament refer to two different entities.

2. God has never interfered in the affairs of man. If he had, it would be a violation of man’s free will. You can’t have it both ways. Either man has free will or he is merely some form of artificial intelligence. For sure, God never ordered up any tsunamis.

1. The god of the bible is not God, the Prime Creator.  See prior posts for details.

The great French philosopher Voltaire said it best when he said that, “ If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.” I believe that Voltaire was correct, although there’s more to the story. To be more precise, God does exist but man invented him anyway.  As John said, no one has ever seen God; so man created God in his own image.